Appearing in Ideas, Vol. 5, No. 2, 1998 Denis Donoghue holds the Henry James Chair of English and American Letters at New York University. He was a 1991-92 Fellow and thereafter a Distinguished Visitor at the National Humanities Center, where he has worked on Walter Pater: Lover of Strange Souls (1995) and his next book, The Practice of Reading, from which this essay comes. He spoke on this topic at the Center to a Spring 1997 gathering of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. A version of that address appears in the Academy's May/June 1998 Bulletin. (Photo: Jean Anne Leuchtenburg)

t may be true that the culture wars are over. There are reports of "a general lessening of theoretical polemical fervour." But if it is true, who won, and why are we not hearing of celebrations? I am ready to believe that young scholars, weary of the toil of battle, have given up quarreling about theoretical issues and are pursuing their studies on the assumption that whatever theoretical framework they need is adequately in place. If it is widely supposed that all such frameworks are in any case merely "constructed" rather than innate, natural, or otherwise privileged, then any one of them is just as employable as another. Or each of them is good for a particular job and may be replaced by another one for the next assignment.

But it is my impression that the wars are not over. There has been a ceasefire, which may well be permanent. But the wars are over only in the sense that the disputants have given up fighting with their opponents and have resorted to another strategy. Each of them--and they are many--has withdrawn from the arena and set up a local constituency, a gathering together of the faithful. Feminism, as a case in point, has made for itself a place apart, where it conducts its business for the benefit of its adherents and does not bother strangers. This strategy requires for its success several enabling institutions: journals given over to feminist issues, regular conferences where feminists address one another and refine their rhetorical skills, courses in colleges and universities, anthologies to cater to the interests of the group. The publication of The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women was a crucial strategic event. There is now somewhere for feminists to go and be together for a while. Students can be assembled around the book; the appropriate discourse can begin. The designation of college courses as separate entities makes these procedures easier. Many interests that were once in conflict with other interests are now pursued separately, on the understanding that each of them concerns the members of its group and no one else. They are organized like sects within the Christian community. Presbyterians do not trouble Methodists so long as Methodists do not interfere with Presbyterians. The quarrels that flare up now are between one adherent and another: The wars are civil wars.

I cannot imagine that anyone regards this as an entirely happy outcome, but it was inevitable. Cultural formations tend to deal with disputes in the end not by resolving them but by enlarging the field, making a separate space for those who refuse to accept the official designation of areas and sites. Lines of demarcation are opportunistically drawn, so that people can decide where they wish to reside. They can choose their neighbors on probable ideological considerations. These devices make life easier: At last we are enjoying a truce, if not permanent peace. No issue has been resolved, but the provision of separate spaces has the effect of making the issues seem not quite as incorrigible as they were in the bad old years. Each group has room to breathe.

I should be content with these arrangements. It is a blessing that my professional life proceeds, free from the noise of ignorant armies clashing by night. But I am not entirely content. I wish the war had ended in the victory of one party, preferably that of my friends. I would like to have seen something achieved, some issue resolved, if only to make the turbulence and the accusations of bad faith appear to have been worthwhile. Lacking a resolution of our quarrels, I am not convinced that it is time to put away the weapons. Even yet, so late in the professional day, I find myself staying awake to be ready for the next theoretical assault. But often, when morning comes, I conclude that many continuing issues trouble me now only in their practical consequences. I have not lost my affection for the disputes of theory: They are--or I thought they were--disputes among rival systems of belief, issues of life if not of death. I still hope to break a theoretical lance occasionally.

But I have come to think that disputes of theory are best engaged as disputes about our ways of reading and interpreting. The idea of arguing with Jacques Derrida, Fredric Jameson, Edward Said, Annette Kolodny, Catherine Stimpson, J. Hillis Miller, Stanley Fish, and Harold Bloom about their theories of literature has not lost its charm, but it might be more worthwhile to ask adepts of feminism, Marxism, Deconstruction, the New Historicism, and Cultural Studies what they think they are doing when they read literature. I have come to feel that theories matter only when they coerce someone's way of reading a book. Then they matter a lot.

So I would ask what distinguishes one interpretation of a poem, a novel, or a play from another, not to determine good and bad but to clarify the different assumptions that govern the readings. How does a particular interpretation of a book indicate the ideological axioms on which its reader silently proceeds? What does a particular reader assume goes without saying? And should not we tease out those assumptions? For the moment, I propose to consider three ways of reading and to delineate the different assumptions that govern each of them. I do not imply that there are only three, though I find it hard to believe that their number is infinitely large or that each reader has an entirely individual set of them. I call the three Matthew Arnold, Walter Pater, and Oscar Wilde.

n December 8, 1860, Matthew Arnold gave a lecture, the second of three under the title "On Translating Homer." Near the end of the lecture he made a comment about the literatures of France and Germany:

Of these two literatures, as of the intellect of Europe in general, the main effort, for now many years, has been a critical effort; the endeavour, in all branches of knowledge,--theology, philosophy, history, art, science,--to see the object as in itself it really is.

Arnold repeated the claim in virtually the same words in a lecture on October 29, 1864 which he published as "The Function of Criticism at the Present Time." Clearly, he thought that English writers had no reason to take satisfaction in their uncritical or anticritical disposition.

Young Matthew Arnold (1822-88). The renowned English poet and critic published his first volume of poems before he was thirty, but his more admired works, such as "Thyrsis" (his elegy on Arthur Hugh Clough) and the melancholy "Dover Beach" came later. (Courtesy of the Wordsworth Trust, Grasmere, Cumbria)

The formula--to see the object as in itself it really is--has been famous since Arnold delivered it. It is still serviceable. In fact, it indicates the standard aim of criticism. Arnold takes it for granted that there is an object to be attended to: a work of literature. He also assumes that the existence of the work is objective; it has as much independence as any other object in the world. A stone, a shell, an epic poem, or a cathedral is what it is and stays the same under anyone's scrutiny: It does not dissolve into the mind that contemplates it. The job of criticism is to discover the qualities of a work of literature by analogy with the properties of any other object to which one pays attention. A good Arnoldian reader tries to see what is there in a particular work--what Henry James calls "the figure in the carpet." Such a reader does not doubt that the figure is already in the carpet. The writer, not the reader, has put it there.

Arnold's phrase--"to see the object as in itself it really is"--indicates the commonly accepted aim of criticism. Most critics evidently think that this is what they should be about. Acting upon the aim, Roman Jakobson read Shakespeare's sonnet "The Expence of Spirit in a Waste of Shame," Donald Davie read Coleridge's "Dejection" ode, Christopher Ricks has read Eliot's poems and Wordsworth's and Beckett's fiction. They have tried to see what is there. To take an example: Lionel Trilling's essay on Wordsworth's "Immortality Ode" pursues Arnold's aim with characteristic verve. Trilling reads the poem in the context of Wordsworth's poetry as a whole, and he interprets it as a poem about growing up, coming to terms with one's life, developing a sense of reality. The Ode, according to Trilling, is not what it has often been thought to be, a dirge sung by Wordsworth over his departing powers: It is the very opposite, "a welcome of new powers and a dedication to a new poetic subject." Trilling is scrupulous in finding that the poem has this quality; he does not add himself to the poem or intrude upon its objective character.

This could also be said of Helen Vendler's essay on the same poem. Her interpretation of it differs from Trilling's. She thinks "the final human value affirmed by the Ode is that of thought arising from feeling." But thoughts are, as Wordsworth said on another occasion, "the representatives of all our past feelings." They come at a later stage. The spontaneity of feelings has been replaced by a more regulated scheme of relations; but in substance, thoughts are not different from feelings. Vendler emphasizes that "Those obstinate questionings / Of sense and outward things" to which Wordsworth refers in the Ode are the very means by which we construct "our later trust in that inward affectional and intellectual reality 'by which we live.'" The Ode is a great poem because Wordsworth has devised in it a language "to join the external world of sense-experience with the interior world of moral consciousness." The fact that Vendler feels no misgiving in referring to the external world and the interior world as different entities makes the Arnoldian point.

Matthew Arnold, The Polymath. This 1872 cartoon in Once a Week depicts him as a trapeze performer easily gliding from poetry to philosophy to criticism. (Courtesy of the British Library)

Trilling and Vendler seem to be reading different poems, or at least attaching special significance to different parts of the same poem, but these critics are Arnoldian in the fundamental sense that they confine themselves to a description of the poem "as in itself it really is." Or they try to do this. In that respect their readings practice a discipline of scruple. We may reject both readings if we think they have not persuasively described the poem, if we think they have been blind to some of its properties. But their essays on the poem respect its apparent objectivity, its status as an independent structure or entity. It follows that Vendler's dispute with Trilling on the question of Wordsworth's Ode is a dispute between parties who are at one in their Arnoldian emphasis: Neither of them has any doubt about the validity, the applicable force, of such terms as "objective" and "subjective." Both critics believe that the "Ode" is an object waiting to be seen as in itself it really is.

I have remarked that Arnold's sense of literature and the criticism of literature is still in force. Despite every exorbitant position taken up by this critic or that, most critics read poems and novels to discover what is there. Let me be more specific. Here is Wordsworth's sonnet "Surprised by Joy":

Surprised by joy--impatient as the Wind
I turned to share the transport--Oh! With whom
But Thee, deep buried in the silent tomb,
That spot which no vicissitude can find?
Love, faithful love, recalled thee to my mind--
But how could I forget thee? Through what power,
Even for the least division of an hour,
Have I been so beguiled as to be blind
To my most grievous loss!--That thought's return
Was the worst pang that sorrow ever bore,
Save one, one only, when I stood forlorn,
Knowing my heart's best treasure was no more;
That neither present time, nor years unborn
Could to my sight that heavenly face restore.

A biographical scholar would report that the occasion of the poem was the death of Wordsworth's daughter Catherine in June 1812 at the age of three. A critic in Arnold's tradition would be concerned rather with the poem as an act of feeling, made possible by the English language, its modes and conventions, and Wordsworth's sense of those.

F. R. Leavis' commentary, which is based on the assumption that a reader of the sonnet will want to read it aloud and will not find that pleasure as easily attained as it seems, states: "The first word of the sonnet . . . is a key word. The explicit exalted surprise of the opening gives way abruptly to the contrasting surprise of that poignant realization, now flooding back, which it had for a moment banished:

                               --Oh! With whom
But Thee, deep buried in the silent tomb. . .

Then follows a surprise for the reader (the others were for the poet too):

That spot which no vicissitude can find.

Leavis adds: "It is a surprise in the sense that one does not at first know how to read it, the turn in feeling and thought being so unexpected. For the line, instead of insisting on the renewed overwhelming sense of loss, appears to offset it with a consideration on the other side of the account, as it were--there would be a suggestion of 'at any rate' in the inflection. Then one discovers that the 'no vicissitude' is the admonitory hint of a subtler pang and of the self-reproach that becomes explicit in the next line but one. There could be little profit in attempting to describe the resulting complex and delicate inflection that one would finally settle on--it would have to convey a certain tentativeness, and a hint of sub-ironical flatness."

Leavis continues: "Then, in marked contrast, comes the straightforward statement,

Love, faithful love, recall'd thee to my mind,

followed by the outbreak of self-reproach, which is developed with the rhetorical emphasis of passion:

But how could I forget thee? Through what power
Even for the least division of an hour,
Have I been so beguiled as to be blind
To my most grievous loss?

The intensity of this is set off by the relapse upon quiet statement in

                                 That thought's return

Was the worst pang that sorrow ever bore,

--quiet statement that pulls itself up with the renewed intensity (still quiet) of

Save one, one only,

where the movement is checked as by a sudden scruple, a recall to precision. . . ."

Leavis has more to say about the poem, but I have quoted enough to represent the quality of his attention. Of course, there is more to be said. Donald Davie noted how "the heart-breaking poignancy" at the beginning of the poem "comes with the syntactical shift over from statement to question" in the lines "I turned to share the transport--Oh with whom / But Thee, deep buried in the silent tomb." It would also be necessary in a full Arnoldian commentary on the poem to consider the effect of personifying "vicissitude" by making it the subject of its clause, going with the verb "can find." The main effect is to change "vicissitude" from a passive condition to a force, appallingly active in its own cause. It would also be worthwhile to attend to the versification of the poem, to register Wordsworth's mastery of the movement of the lines, how he uses the resources of meter and rhyme to control the phrasing. I note, for example, the power of the phrasing, the fingering--as a musician would say--achieved by rhyming "return" with "forlorn" and "unborn," that last word referring immediately to "years" but also to the forlornness of feeling that the child was indeed born, only to be unborn three years later.

(More, to Part 2 of 3)